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ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship as a pseudo-discipline has matured to the point where it has begun to question the myths which have developed around it. As a panacea for the development ills of capitalism, studies have spanned various ideological and methodological viewpoints. Spatially, entrepreneurship studies have grown to include countries of the Global South and emerging economies, particularly those of Eastern Europe. This special issue extends this reach to the small developing states of the Caribbean and particularly those with a British colonial legacy rooted in the remnants of the plantation economy. The commencement of political independence in the 1960s has not resulted in any significant economic independence for the region as it remains dependent on foreign investment, whilst its key sectors remain subject to the volatility of the economies of the global north. The papers in this special issue identify domestic and enterprise level constraints to the development of entrepreneurship in the region. This Introduction places these, mostly micro-level studies, in a wider context, concluding that policy-makers need to better understand the concept of entrepreneurship and its role in achieving developmental goals. Our challenging recommendation is that those formulating and delivering these policies and practices should do so with an entrepreneurial mind-set.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The most recent collation of scholarly works in the area was as a result of the 2015 Mona School of Business and Management’s business and management conference, published in Social and Economic Studies (Minto-Coy, Cowell, and McLeod Citation2016).
2. See http://www.jbi.org.jm/pages/industry [Accessed 2 July 2017].
3. Storey (Citation2003) found that in Trinidad and Tobago owners of micro and small enterprises from an African background were more likely to be denied bank funding than those from an Asian background. There were, however, no differences by gender. The use of ‘denial’ or rejection is likely to be an under-estimate of financial exclusion since it excludes ‘good’ non-applicants – the so-called ‘Discouraged Borrowers’ (Kon and Storey Citation2003).
4. Baumol, Litan, and Schramm (Citation2007) suggest that there are ‘…two ways in which wealth may be acquired: by undertaking productive activities that enlarge the size of total output for any society, or by ignoring that objective and seeking instead to gain a larger share of whatever output is generated. In the vernacular, the choices are to expand the pie or seek larger slices’ (p.104).
5. See: http://www.gemconsortium.org/wiki/1149 [Accessed 7 July 2017].
6. The 2014 data is utilised as it is the most recent year to provide data on all five countries of the region included in the GEM programme.
7. Includes Business Services, Information and Communication, Financial Intermediation and Real Estate, Professional Services or Administrative Services as defined by ISIC 4.0.
8. See: http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/getting-credit [Accessed 2 April 2018].
9. See: http://competecaribbean.org/proteqin/ [Accessed 2 April 2018].
10. The Caribbean is not alone in failing to subject its SME and entrepreneurship policies to scrutiny. See Fotopoulos and Storey (Citation2018) for examples drawn from high income countries.
11. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development has provided an outlet for research that has shaped knowledge and understanding of these and related themes in recent years (e.g. Aliaga-Isla and Rialp Citation2013; Baycan-Levent and Nijkamp Citation2009; Beckers and Blumberg Citation2013; Brzozowski, Cucculelli, and Surdej Citation2014; Kloosterman Citation2003, Citation2010; Sepulveda, Syrett, and Lyon Citation2011).
12. To reflect the variance the Guyana figure in 2014 was 24.5%.